In its ruling of 28 August 2008 the Budapest Metropolitan Court of First Instance acquitted Tibor E. Rejtő, Attila Kulcsár's mentor, of the charge of being an accessory before the fact to an act of embezzlement, and it appeared that he would not face punishment.

However, at today's appeal court hearing the Metropolitan Chief Prosecutor of Appeals, István Sódor, verbally confirmed his request to the Metropolitan Regional Court to declare the ruling of 2008 void, and to instruct the court of first instance to institute new proceedings.

Thus, the charge against Rejtő - who was earlier acquitted - could be "revived", albeit not in the same form, since one of István Sódor's chief objections to the ruling of first instance was that the Budapest Metropolitan Court qualified the basic act incorrectly. Therefore, Kulcsár presumably did not commit embezzlement (meaning his alleged accomplices did not cooperate in the act either), did not expropriate anything he was entrusted with, nor did he even dispose of them as his own property.

What was lacking for the act to be qualified as embezzlement was "entrustment", since the clients did not directly commission Kulcsár but rather K&H's broker company to open accounts for them, and the bank did not authorise the later defendant with the rights of disposal and transfer necessary to commit embezzlement. In other words, the correct definition of the former broker's criminal act would not be embezzlement but rather fraud since Kulcsár used forged papers to deceive VIP clients and bank cashiers over an extended period with the objective of procuring an illegal profit.

Should the Metropolitan Regional Court therefore decide to recommence the trial, Rejtő would in such instance have to start everything from the beginning. At today's hearing the Chief Prosecutor of Appeals deemed it to be - at the very least - unusual that the ruling of first instance had not involved an examination of the pieces of evidence which indicated that the former CEO had cooperated in covering up Kulcsár's manoeuvres. One of the witnesses in the trial had stated earlier that in the world of finance Kulcsár was nicknamed "Rejtő's lapdog".

Caption: Now just a memory. Attila Kulcsár prior to the outbreak of the K&H scandal with CEO Tibor E. Rejtő and Imre Karl, then an MP for MSZP, Hungary's socialist party.

One of the facts proving that at one time the two men were mutually dependant upon one another is that between January 2001 and summer 2003 they telephoned each other over four thousand times, while Kulcsár placed only a quarter as many calls to family members. At today's hearing of second instance K&H's legal representative alluded to the detail that although Rejtő had been forced to suspend Kulcsár from executing his banking activity at the time that the scandal broke out, following this the ex-CEO and former broker spoke by telephone on 58 occasions.

In addition to Rejtő re-entering the scene, the main development of today's hearing was the revelation that if the high court send the Kulcsár case back to the first instance, there is unlikely to be a judgement at law before 2015-2016. One of the reasons for this is that in 2003 Vienna's highest provincial court delivered the broker to Hungary - who had been in hiding in Austria - on account of the charges of embezzlement and falsification of documents, but there was no reference to fraud in the extradition request. Although the extradition order still stands, its implementation would delay the retrial procedure by months.

In the edition of Heti Válasz, which went on sale today, Budapest Chief Prosecutor Sándor Ihász drew attention to one problem, among others, namely that if the Kulcsár trial commences again at the first instance, examining the several thousands of pages of documents that have accumulated so far would in itself take months, thus a judgement at law could be years away.